LAB NOTES

By Compiled by and News staff

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

May 16, 1998 | 12:00 AM

It's a wheel difference Those stereotypes about male motorists being belligerent and females being absent-minded may not be too far from the truth, according to a study of the personality traits of red light runners. The San Francisco Department of Health study found there were two distinct categories of red light runners: distracted drivers and aggressive drivers. The top reason given by women who admitted running red lights was that they were distracted. The men said most often they ran red lights because they were going too fast a hallmark of aggressive driving. Skull puzzle solved An American anthropologist has solved a puzzle that was perplexing scientists for generations why is the modern human skull so different from its prehistoric ancestors? Daniel Liberman of Rutgers University in New Jersey reported in the journal Nature that the shape and dimensions of the modern human head are due to a change in the sphenoid, a small bone at the base of the skull, that occurred 125,000 years ago. "It was this initial shift that set up the modern human skull. It can explain, for example, why humans might have developed more rapidly which appears to be the case," he said. A far-out finding A group of astronomers have spotted the newest farthest galaxy 12.

3 billion light-years away. Astronomers Esther Hu and Lennox Cowie of the University of Hawaii, along with Richard McMahon of Cambridge University in England, spotted it with one of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.